


So, hit the lights, I'll do it again

by sympathy_for_hordak (sparrow0)



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Entrapdak Secret Santa, F/M, Fluff, Mild Angst, Post-Canon, Season/Series 04 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21939526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparrow0/pseuds/sympathy_for_hordak
Summary: Some time after Horde Prime is defeated, Hordak is injured. He gets better.Happy Entrapdak Secret Santa 2019! This is a gift for tumblr user mae-is-ace.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 67





	So, hit the lights, I'll do it again

Hordak drifted awake, disoriented. At first he expected to be in reconditioning, securely restrained, and the absence of pressure felt wrong. 

No, this couldn't be reconditioning. He wasn't upright, and his head wasn't pounding with the force of the downloads. The floor he was sitting on was cold and familiar - had he collapsed in the Fright Zone? 

No, it was gone, shattered by his failure and his grief. Etheria had returned to the Known Universe. Everything had ended. Where was he? How had he survived? 

Hordak opened his eyes. There was a blanket over him, and he was in a dimly-lit Etherian Horde supply truck. Someone was near the door, her back to him, typing rapidly, and his breath caught in his throat. 

Entrapta was alive, he recalled, she had endured Beast Island and been rescued by the allies he had lured her away from. And then...what? How did he know that? 

He groaned, awed and irritated in equal measure. 

"Hordak," Entrapta said, and he was stunned by the warmth of it, delighted and baffled to hear the name he had chosen. 

Hordak had not had a name for very long, and then he had not had it any longer, and now it had been restored, somehow. 

"Hordak," she tried again. "Can you tell me who I am?" 

"Entrapta," he answered immediately. "I know who you are, but not how we're here." 

"It'll come back. I sedated you. What's the last thing you remember doing?" she asked. 

Hordak made a wordless sound of frustration as information overwhelmed him. Miraculously, the Etherians had given Hordak back to himself, had taken over the Empire, and had allowed him to settle on their world. Hordak remembered...

  
  
  


"Hordak!" Entrapta said, dropping out of a vent into their little sitting room in Bright Moon. "I need your opinions. I got the samples I requested!" 

He blinked up at her. "Samples of what?" 

"Fabrics and flooring materials, for restoring the Crypto Castle," she said, using her hair to offer him a box. 

"The Crypto Castle is yours. Dryl is yours. I am yours. You need my opinions?" he asked. 

"Of course I do! The Fright Zone was fascinating! I want your input on our castle, lab partner." 

Hordak opened the box and began to look through the contents. "You don't have a color scheme yet, do you? Does Dryl have a crest?" 

"I don't have a color scheme, but we do have a crest, here, it's on the handle of this quad driver," Entrapta said, handing him the tool. 

Hordak peered at the shape, swiping at his tablet and sketching with his claws. "What about this?" he offered, turning the screen to show her the stylized gear flanked by the Horde's bat wings. 

"Oooooh, yes," Entrapta answered. "Let's wrap your wings around my gear, since we're running the Fright Zone, too. What about colors?"

"Maybe pink on a black field? I'd use red and dark purple as accents, but the crest itself needs contrast." 

Entrapta tilted her head. "Why?"

"One's symbol should be vivid, so it is easily recognizable from a great distance, in war or in peace, in victory or in defiance."

"We have been so totally victorious," Entrapta said. "It's a great idea to flaunt that. " 

She paused, then continued. "I still want to go explore the stars! But first I want to help this place rebuild. We can go exploring when Etheria is a little more stable, and we're a little less drained." 

"Indeed. I will go anywhere you want," Hordak offered. 

Entrapta kissed his cheek. "What do you think about the rest of these? I want the castle to feel like home." 

Hordak went through the box with her, making suggestions. 

  
  
  


In the present, Hordak's memory had mostly returned, but he was missing some details. 

"Can you tell me exactly what happened?" Hordak said. "I recall being injured, now, but at the time we didn't know how we had gotten into that position."

"Yeah, of course. You remember when Bow built those loud little devices, the chirpers, to alert people of trouble, after Frosta had that scare and nobody was at the communications hub?" Entrapta sighed. "It turns out Glimmer, Catra, and Adora have been leaving theirs in the throne room at Bright Moon for the past eight months." 

Hordak's eyes widened. "So for months - "

"You and I have been in command of Etheria at least 67 percent of the time, between that and the part where everybody keeps going off-world to deal with Empire stuff. Perfuma couldn't tell me which month or which galaxy she lost her chirper in."

"That I understand. Plumeria has no tradition of disaster recovery drills. Catra and Adora should have known better, because I had DR protocols! They spent years being trained to take danger seriously! And they left the chirpers in the throne room." Hordak groaned in frustration. 

Entrapta shrugged. "I mean, nobody noticed they'd been doing it for months. We don't have that much danger and usually whoever's been around has been able to deal with whatever it is. The event yesterday was one of those problems where a whole lot of things had to go wrong all together." 

"What else went wrong?" Hordak asked. 

"So this group called the People's Resistance on Manana started threatening to execute a whole bunch of Imperial clones. Mermista and Sea Hawk went over there, worked out a peace deal, and got invited to a celebration. Inconveniently, Manana's people have extraordinarily high tolerances for recreational psychoactive substances. Mermista was messed up deeply enough, long enough, at a far enough physical distance from her runestone for her connection to malfunction."

"She's alive?" Hordak asked. 

"Oh, yeah, she's just embarrassed and hungover. We thought she might have been killed or tortured - but she just got super plastered," Entrapta continued. "Nobody knew that was possible, and Sea Hawk and Mermista were too far under to tell us anything. The People's Resistance is really sorry. Unfortunately, the Pearl slipping out of balance caused a whole bunch of bad storms and floods, which is why Seaworthy chirped everybody at the planetary defense level. You had the most serious injuries." 

"I thought that roof could take my weight and the armor was waterproof. In fact, I knew it was waterproof, because the rain wasn't a problem," Hordak mused. 

"It was waterproof! If you'd fallen into water, or the ocean, or a normal sewer, you would have been fine. That building had been a tannery. They were up to code, all their really nasty stuff was in sealed tanks. You landed on one of them, split it open, and broke your wrist. If you hadn't had the floodwater and the armor as buffers, you would have been injured a lot worse."

"I thought I'd gotten electrical burns when the armor shorted out. If it was a corrosive chemical spill, how did you get me out?" Hordak asked. 

"I mean, the robots I used for it needed new limbs, but our fabrication units have already taken care of that. No damage was done that could not be repaired. The Princess Alliance is grateful and apologetic. Is - is that okay?" 

"Yes. You're here with me, Entrapta, this world is ours, and we're each other's," Hordak said. 

She wrapped herself around him, and they held one another. 

**Author's Note:**

> "So, hit the lights, I'll do it again" is a lyric from My Chemical Romance's "[Party Poison](https://genius.com/My-chemical-romance-party-poison-lyrics)."
> 
> The winged gear comes from MinaAffairs' [Lord & Lady of Dryl](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1377868) series. 
> 
> "Manana" is a funnier-sounding variant on "[Manaan](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Manaan/Legends)."
> 
> I twisted the wishes I received a little bit, focusing on the two of them having power, her caring for him, and the two of them solving lower-stakes problems.


End file.
